I’ve been on openSUSE Leap 15 since May. That’s a whole two months of usage! I apparently picked openSUSE Leap as my main distro right before the next service pack was due to release: Leap 15.6. OpenSUSE upgrades are really simple so I decided to make a video of it.
At the end of the video, I’m playing Planetside 2 and the frame rate is great. A successful upgrade! But later I noticed something weird when I booted into an old kernel: No Nvidia Drivers were running!
Searching the repositories with revealed no previous kernel versions. This seems to be a curious side-effect from the upgrade in that the old kernels and versions were left behind in the 15.5 repositories. It’s not necessarily surprising but it is a bit unexpected. You could encounter an issue like this on Debian if you upgraded from 10 to 11.
On some Linux distributions, drivers like Nvidia’s are installed as a Dynamic Kernel Module (DKMS). You install the module from a software package, and DKMS rebuilds it whenever the kernel version changes. That didn’t happen here because openSUSE’s doesn’t use DKMS.
This post isn’t about the dynamicity of kernel modules though. It’s just an interesting consequence of relying on a driver that must be rebuilt for each kernel and silently dropping support for old kernels. A classic “gotcha“.
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